Cheap Train Fares guide discussion

maxxxam

Exactly the same as above. Tried at around 3.05 and every time I entered my email and captcha it simply reloaded. Not sure what the problem was but rather frustrating.

BigRonW

Has anyone else experienced difficulty when attempting to buy tickets using the Red Spotted Hanky website and Martin's vouchers? I wanted to travel from Weston-super-Mare to Cheltenham Spa and back on my birthday; seemed like a great opportunity to save. I started by ticket-splitting (at Bedminster in Bristol) which saved me £1.60 (around 10%) but booking two cheap-day returns for two people has proven impossible - the booking gets as far as "Payment Details", then gets stuck and will progress no further.

veryintrigued

RSH promotion worked a treat here - collected e-voucher and have just used - thank you Martins Money and RSH

SteveJW

Worked fine here at 15:15 using Firefox browser

2004nsnazir

hi
i never go on trains but need to go from luton to nottingham.its very exspensive.i need returns. can anyone tell me or find out if a network rail card or 16-25 will be cheaper.i wil be travelling on east midlands train.wen i add railcard nothing comes up stil same price.so i need expert advice.thanks all

luckwudaveit

2004nsnazir wrote: »

hi
i never go on trains but need to go from luton to nottingham.its very exspensive.i need returns. can anyone tell me or find out if a network rail card or 16-25 will be cheaper.i wil be travelling on east midlands train.wen i add railcard nothing comes up stil same price.so i need expert advice.thanks all

A Network Railcard will only get you as far as Bedford, so a 16-25 Railcard would be a better option. You don't give any dates or times so I couldn't advise on specific fares.

thelawnet

2004nsnazir wrote: »

hi
i never go on trains but need to go from luton to nottingham.its very exspensive.i need returns. can anyone tell me or find out if a network rail card or 16-25 will be cheaper.i wil be travelling on east midlands train.wen i add railcard nothing comes up stil same price.so i need expert advice.thanks all

16-25 railcard is always better, unless you are travelling with others. Fewer restrictions, same discount (one third).

There are discounts if you book in advance also, but these are not guaranteed to be any cheaper.

A super-off-peak return is £42, or £27.70 with a railcard, an off-peak £67.50/£44.55.

If you are scouting advance fares, try Luton Airport Parkway - Nottingham as well, as it may be cheaper.

There is an option to buy a much cheaper ticket, which is Rugby - Derby, priced at £13.40 off-peak return with a railcard.

As you can see here:

http://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/service/timesandfares/RUG/DBY/tomorrow/1636/dep?via=Bedford

(check the breakdown for the 19:32)
A Rugby - Derby ticket is valid from Bedford to Derby.

Also, tickets to Derby and Nottingham are generally, and in this case, intervailable, so it's valid to travel Bedford - Nottingham.

You can add to this a ticket Luton Airport Parkway - Bedford - £10.90 Anytime Return with railcard, or £5.20 for an off-peak day return.

luckwudaveit

thelawnet wrote: »

http://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/service/timesandfares/RUG/DBY/tomorrow/1636/dep?via=Bedford

(check the breakdown for the 19:32)
A Rugby - Derby ticket is valid from Bedford to Derby.

That is just madness. Great example of the lunacy of this country's ticketing prices.

redux

thelawnet wrote: »

There is an option to buy a much cheaper ticket, which is Rugby - Derby, priced at £13.40 off-peak return with a railcard.

A Rugby - Derby ticket is valid from Bedford to Derby.
Also, tickets to Derby and Nottingham are generally, and in this case, intervailable, so it's valid to travel Bedford - Nottingham.

I hope you won't mind me asking, but how do you come up with such imaginative deviations involving places rather off track?

Are there lists of known places which can work as nodes for things like this, or was this just trial and error based on an instinct?

thelawnet

redux wrote: »

I hope you won't mind me asking, but how do you come up with such imaginative deviations involving places rather off track?

Are there lists of known places which can work as nodes for things like this, or was this just trial and error based on an instinct?

There are a number of tools, but

https://www.trainscanbecheaper.info
and
https://www.brfares.com

are the main ones.

Except for short journeys most train tickets are subject to a list of permitted routes. Each station in the UK is either a routeing point, or is associated with one (or more).

Determining the routeing points can be done using the instructions here:

http://www.atoc.org/about-atoc/rail-settlement-plan/routeing-guide

That site is official, but is not entirely accessible, and https://www.trainscanbecheaper.info is a computerised engine into the process.

So if you type in:

Luton to Nottingham in that site, and click 'Show Permitted Routes', it says:

LUTON is associated with these routeing points: BEDFORD, WATFORD JUNCTION, West Hampstead Group.
NOTTINGHAM is part of the Nottingham Group.

So you can see Luton is not a routeing point, and Nottingham is (In fact it's part of the Nottingham Group which includes two other nearby stations.)

Luton is associated with no less than three routeing points, but as it happens towards Nottingham the valid one is Bedford, because the single fare from Bedford to Nottingham is less (or the same) than the single fare from Luton to Nottingham, but the fares from Watford Junction and West Hampstead are higher.

So the permitted routes are:

Luton - Bedford by the shortest route (which is obvious if you look at a map)
then Bedford - Nottingham by 'mapped routes'.

(in addition, the shortest route from Luton to Nottingham and any routes up to 3 miles longer are also valid. )

If you see bottom of the trainscanbecheaper.info page it tells us this:

The following are Permitted unless there is an easement preventing them:
Any route 99.31 miles or less (i.e. within 3 miles of the shortest route above).
Mapped routes from BEDFORD to NOTTINGHAM (analyse mapped routes)
NM

The link NM is hyperlinked to this page: http://www.atoc.org/clientfiles/File/Maps.pdf#page=84

on the ATOC website

It shows the permitted routes, which are any you can trace between the origin routeing point and destination point without doubling back, and which are not very exciting - either straight up to Nottingham, or you can detour via Melton Mowbray.

You can also see the routeing points en route:

London
|
West Hampstead
|
Bedford
|
Kettering
|
Leicester
|
Loughborough
|
Nottingham

Luton is between West Hampstead and Bedford.

The return fare from Luton to Nottingham is on brfares.com

http://brfares.com/#fares?orig=LUT&dest=NOT&rlc=

As you can see, £42 for a super-off-peak return is the cheapest fare.

Our goal is to use one of the routeing points en route to Nottingham from Luton - Bedford, Kettering, Leicester, etc. and find a cheaper ticket valid via that routeing point using a map like the map NM above (but obvously different!).

(BTW West Hampstead is obviously too far south, we're very unlikely to find a route valid via there, so we ignore that)

If we can find a ticket via say Bedford, then we just need a ticket from Luton to Bedford (which should be quite cheap) and then that ticket, to complete our journey - provided of course that the train stops at Bedford.

Anyway, next thing we do is look at the national rail map:

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/passenger_services/maps/nationalrailnetworkmapZoom.pdf

The route Bedford - Nottingham is obviously 'owned' by East Midlands train so what we do instead is look east and west to find routes.

To the east there are no links until we get as far as Peterborough, so that's unlikely to be useful, but to the west you can see that there's a line Tamworth - Derby, Nuneaton-Leicester (which would make fares from this area a possible substitute for a Leicester - Nottingham ticket), and most promisingly Bletchley-Bedford. It looks obvious that Bletchley - Nottingham will be valid via Bedford, but we are going to need to be a bit more ingenious to find a ticket valid via Bletchley but cheaper.

Anyway, we will start with places furthest north (closest to Nottingham), as they should have the lowest fares.

Trying Tamworth - Nottingham, we are shown this:

http://www.trainscanbecheaper.info/default.aspx?from=TAM&to=NOT&via0=&via1=&via2=&via3=&via4=

Mapped routes from TAMWORTH to NOTTINGHAM
CE
EM
WM+BG

EM permits us to travel via Leicester. It's not valid via Kettering despite the nice loop via Melton Mowbray because of doubling back (check the rail map)

WM + BG uses two maps and here you must start at Tamworth on WM, travel to a point on that map that is also on BG using map WM only, and then travel from that point on BG to Nottingham using map BG only.

WM allows you to go as far south as Bletchley, but BG doesn't include Bletchley, so that's not a valid route.

What map WM does show us is the other local routeing points:
Nuneaton
Rugby
Northampton
Bletchley

and others

We can also see on these maps that we should check routes to Derby as well, because of the link between Derby and Nottingham making it easy to travel between the two stations without stopping off en route.

So anyway, we check

Tamworth- Derby
Tamworth-Nottingham

Nuneaton - Derby
Nuneaton - Nottingham

Rugby - Derby
Rugby - Nottingham

etc. to find tickets.

Eventually we find Rugby - Derby

http://www.trainscanbecheaper.info/default.aspx?from=RUG&to=DBY&via0=&via1=&via2=&via3=&via4=


and we see map TV+EM permitting Rugby - Bletchley - Bedford on map TV and then Bedford - Kettering - Leicester - Lougborough - Nottingham - Derby on map EM.

All without doubling back.

If we use the function 'check if route permitted'

for Rugby - Derby via Bedford, Nottingham

http://www.trainscanbecheaper.info/default.aspx?from=RUG&to=DBY&via0=BDM&via1=NOT&via2=&via3=&via4=

it confirms that it is.

This is an unofficial website, so we do our best to get https://www.nationalrail.co.uk to confirm it's valid, in case we have to argue with a guard....

Now we have a ticket Rugby - Derby that is valid to travel Bedford - Nottingham, so we just need a ticket Luton - Bedford.

There's no question of routeing points here, just check the fare.

brfares tells us:

http://brfares.com/#fares?orig=LUT&dest=BDM&rlc=

£8.40 single, £7.80 off-peak single, £7.90 off-peak day return, £14.30 anytime day return.

But there's no multi-day return. So a return over two days would cost at least as much as two off-peak singles, £15.60

So we check the next station south - Luton Airport Parkway according to the map - and then check perhaps if there is a multi-day return from there:

http://brfares.com/#fares?orig=LTN&dest=BDM&rlc=%20%20%20

There is, the Anytime Return (note not Anytime Day Return), but it's £16.50 so more expensive than two off-peak singles in fact (sorry I didn't check this properly before, I should have said buy two singles).

It still might be better to buy this return, because if you have a railcard you might have a minimum fare, so sometimes it is cheaper to buy a discounted, slightly more expensive return ticket, than two undiscounted cheap ones.

But probably there's not much in it - the real saving here comes in finding that Rugby-Derby is valid via Bletchley, Bedford and Nottingham!

So that's the process really.

Took much longer to describe than it did to do. Essentially you are looking for routeing points near the place you are starting from and the place you are going to, and checking if they permit a very roundabout route, some portion of which represents the route you actually want to travel.